Mary Ann's Tropical Building Page

Report #2:July 1, 1997

www.beachshack.ai

Summary:

My husband Bob
and I have acquired land on
a Caribbean island
where we plan to design and
construct our home, a technology center,
and a guest house. These pages
record our plans, resources, ideas, problems, and progress.

Hints: Click on any small picture to see it larger and
visit the Site Map for previous and
future progress reports, house plans, bookstore and references.

Mining for Palms!

We decided to start by digging the holes for all the cisterns,
septic tanks, and landscaping.

The property is solid rock, so large trees and bushes will only
grow where you provide a hole in the ground.

The truck in this picture is our construction truck for
the project.
Rather than spend a lot of
money on full grown trees, we decided to put the
money into bigger holes in the ground and plant smaller trees
earlier.
Plants grow very quickly in the tropics.

Another
reason for digging the holes now is that digging shakes the
ground and we don't want to crack the foundation walls.

Hole digging is done by a huge hammer machine called a priestman,
where other countries might use dynamite. Blasting with
dynamite is not allowed in Anguilla, which may be a good thing
considering the Anguillians preference for do-it-yourself projects.

We had two hammers to get the job done quickly: one from
National Trucking and another from Rayme Lake.

The 24 Hour BackHoe Man stopped by the site, left a card. We
hired him and his 4-wheel drive backhoe because he could keep
up with the two pounders and could get into very tricky spots.
He offers a 24-hour service, so if you have a backhoe emergency
feel free to call him at any time.

Gazebo

We got quotes for building our beach gazebo, which will be
constructed of used telephone poles with a wood shingle roof.
We are
building it first, as a separate contract, because
the poles require holes to be excavated into solid rock. There would
be no easy way to get the large equipment into the area after the
house is built.
Construction should start July 1st, 1997. This will give us a shaded
place to sit by the beach, watching the rest of the work!
More news
next month.

Wooden Windows-Arrg!

We went back to Puerto Rico on June 13th, 1997 to double-check
on wooden louvered windows (PRM, or Piarem).
In September we had found several
sources Imbuia or Mahogeny doors and windows from Brazil with
operable louvers. This visit the distributors couldn't help us --
the factories in Brazil haven't been shipping or filling orders,
so the lumber yards have given up on them. This is a setback.
We heard about sources from Costa Rica that sell through
Miami (no precise names/numbers yet) and Guyana (how do you get
the products to Anguilla at a reasonable cost and without
them disappearing. Luke Thomas of Anguilla Post and Beam
has a load of greenheart timber coming from Guyana this month -- we
will see how his deal works out.

We did find one new supplier, Homespot Woodworking
in Puerto Rico, that
makes louvered doors and windows with brass hardware, including
framing at the end of
each louver. The quality looked good, if you like that mix of
wood and metal and if you think the brass won't decay at
the beach.

How Many Software Engineers Does It Take to Paint A Roof?

Anglec has not connected our power yet to the site, so we don't
have telephone, fax or Internet service at the site either.

But we do have a generator,
which we have used once. We wanted to paint the roof of the
office container reflective white to cut the heat more and
stop the rusting. We used three software engineers for this job:
Griffin on the roof to spread the paint, Bob to hand up the refills
of paint, and Johanne (MIS manager at Anglec and Griffin's wife) to mix the paint using a 10KV generator to power an electric drill.
Considering our respective salaries, this must be the most expensive
container roof in the Caribbean.